Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Spontaneous Poetics - 91

Student:I feel
I have to defend myself against (you and) the rest of the class

Allen Ginsberg: Do you have a “self” to defend? – okay, if you insist on
having a “self”

Student: Well you said (my comparison with set theory wasn’t
so helpful) but why I said that was, that if the members don’t interact, then
that means that, just like in a sentence, that means there’s no articulation,
(group consciousness) is not being put into form

Ted Berrigan: The articulation [in Anne Waldman’s “Fast Speaking Woman”] is in the dance of vowels and syllables, much more there
than in “Pressure”,
where everything there snaps. In this poem, everything sings (and when you see
it performed, for example, you understand that very clearly because it comes
off her so smoothly). The interaction is in the music so much more in “Fast
Speaking Woman” than in “Pressure”, which has a great breathless quality

Allen Ginsberg: Well, then, her next move was “Musical Garden”, where
she complicated the line, interestingly – “Can’t give you up, speech, can’t
stop/ clamoring” – So then (she) began to augment the line, because she
couoldn’t repeat the poem, or the same attack on the poem, one poem after
another, with the same simple lines, so then she began expanding the musical
possibilities and the ideation and image possibilities within the sweetheart,
my tender/ chocolate big-lipped love/ Can’t give up all dear ones, your bright/
ears and delicate smiles” – So you see how she began developing that. Actually,
it’s sort of like a primary course inthe list poem,going from one poem to another to
another of hers and seeing how she’s developed it, and finally, in the last
[1976 -most recent] poem, “Shaman” ["Shaman Hisses"], there’s very complicated lines,
involving description, with different actions, long, very long sometimes.
Sometimes a short single-word line, but, most of the time, it’s a line
describing a whole action – “Shaman, your mother’s calling you on the
telephone”

The reason I brought this up was (is), if you have a litany,
or a list poem, or if you want to try one like that, if you’re developing one,
or if you’re revising one, or working on one, just to bear in mind that (a)
single-word list poem has been done, a double-word list poem has been done.
You’ve got to have something interesting in each line. Anne has developed it in
this way. (Christopher) Smart started with a much more pedestrian
line, you might say, (a) more everyday line. A major element in it all,
however, is the ear for the line, keeping the line of such an elastic spoken
quality that the whole thing hangs together as one tripping breath, or one
vowel-ic breath (but there you’d have to pay attention to sound, you’d have to
pay attention to having the imagery colorful enough enough to fill out a line).